Xbox to launch mobile gaming store this July

The digital storefront for Xbox mobile gaming will be web-only at launch

A crucial element of Microsoft's acquisition of Activision-Blizzard-King has been to establish dominance in mobile gaming. While the acquisition brought iconic gaming franchises like Call of Duty, Diablo, and Overwatch to Xbox, perhaps the biggest would be Candy Crush. After talking about bringing more first-party experiences to mobile for years, Xbox is finally committing to the idea by launching its first mobile gaming store later this year.

In an interview with Bloomberg following the news of various studio shutdowns at Xbox, Sarah Bond confirmed that the mobile Xbox storefront will go live later this year.

"We felt strongly that there has been an opportunity for there to be an experience in mobile that is centered around gamers," she said. "But there isn't actually a gaming platform in-store experience that is centered around players and goes truly across device where who you are, your library, your identity, your rewards that it travels with you versus being locked to a single ecosystem. And we recognized that opportunity for a long time, but we wanted to make sure that anything we built was really grounded in people who play those mobile native games and the creators of them."

"And so in July, we are going to be launching our mobile store experience," added Bond. "We're going to start actually by bringing our own first-party portfolio to that. So you're going to see games like Candy Crush show up and that experience games like Minecraft."

Call of Duty Mobile is one of Xbox's biggest mobile powerhouses. / Activision

The mobile store will launch as a web-only experience first to avoid the "independent policies" of "closed ecosystem stores." Bond is undoubtedly referring to Apple's digital App Store, which was recently opened to external distributors thanks to the European Commission’s Digital Markets Act. Despite that, Apple has tried to stop third-party publishers like Epic from launching their apps on the store while providing an external alternative.

The Xbox mobile store will launch with first-party content from Microsoft's gaming division, so expect titles like Fallout Shelter, The Elder Scrolls: Blades, Age of Empires Mobile, Gears Pop and, of course, Call of Duty: Mobile. Expect the games to maintain cross-platform progression with their Xbox console counterparts through cloud saves.

Xbox will announce its next slate of first-party games at the Xbox Games Showcase on June 9, 2024, though the company needs to dig itself out of the PR nightmare that calls its leadership into question.